The particular problem of weight control is an acute one in Western society where a large proportion of society has been unable to balance their energy expenditure with their intake of calories. This is due in part to the generally sedentary lifestyle adopted in Western society and in part to the ready availability of foodstuffs, especially ‘fast-foods’ which are high in fats and sugars. Without adequate exercise, excess calories are converted and accumulated as body fat.
Excessive body weight and poor diet have been linked with obesity and a number of degenerative diseases, such as diabetes, coronary heart disease and some forms of cancer, and damage to macro- and micro-vascular systems and endothelial cells. An alarming proportion of society is, obese or suffers from long-term degenerative diseases. Moreover, obesity usually negatively impacts an individual's self esteem and can contribute to depression, anti-social behaviour and decreased productivity.
At any one time, a majority of North American adults are on a diet to attempt to lose weight. Unfortunately, many diets focus on immediate and rapid weight loss without providing an appropriate nutrient profile. Often these diets sacrifice palatability in favour of rapid calorie reduction, rendering them unsustainable over the long term. The result is usually an initial period of weight loss followed by a return to former eating habits because of the dieter's inability to maintain an unpalatable diet in the face of overwhelming food cravings. This creates the well known ‘yo-yo’ dieting effect which exacerbates the initial problem and has a negative impact on general physical health and individual self-esteem.
The problem is that individuals experience substantial difficulty in creating dietary menus that meet their specific dietary needs or goals. The most common dietary goal is body weight control, and in particular, weight loss, but an individual's dietary needs or goals can include glycemic control, blood lipid lowering or fecal bulking. The fact that people are having difficulty meeting this goal is evidenced by the proliferation of weight-loss advice, products and systems.
The difficulty people experience with creating dietary menus that meet their needs or goals is usually threefold. First, the person often lacks appropriate information about nutrition or an understanding of an appropriate nutrient profile. Second, the person is often uncertain as to what foodstuffs satisfy particular nutrient needs and in what quantity the foodstuffs should be eaten. Finally, typical dietary menus exclude the foods that people enjoy most and include the foods that people like to avoid, thereby rendering the menu unpalatable. As a result of this latter difficulty, a dietary menu plan is easily abandoned in favour of a person's old eating habits.
What is therefore required is a method of providing dieters with menus that meet the dietary constraints imposed by their particular health profile and by their particular physiological goals, but that also maximize the palatability of the resulting diet to the individual dieter. Such a system should be independent from the level of knowledge that a user has about the nutrient content of particular foodstuffs.